It’s not that journalists aren’t biased. Certainly they are. But professionals take steps to limit the intrusion of personal bias.
Working alone, what are the odds this reporter can challenge his own assumptions and guard against his own bias creeping into a news report? Not great.
Surround him with colleagues and reporters who are dedicated to neutrality, though, and the odds improve.
Journalists understand these human tendencies which is why they submit to the discipline of verification and embrace a checks-and-balances process by which the editing team challenges and shapes the final report.
As a craft, journalism has spent a great deal of time thinking about these questions, which is why codes of ethics exist: to police the neutrality of journalism.
In that way, the hope is that individual biases can be whittled and sanded off a story as a team of individuals – all with the goal of neutrality – brings their own experiences and biases to bear on ferreting out flaws and fixing them.
So, in summing up this lesson:
- News should be reliable, but a large part of that reliability also comes from knowing that the outlet will give you a fair and balanced view of a story
- Fairness is defined here as: Marked by impartiality and honesty. Free from self-interest, prejudice, or favoritism. Being fair to the evidence.
- Fairness can be determined by finding out whether or not an outlet uses fair language, and fair presentation of the facts in a story.
- Balance is defined as: Equality between the totals of the two (or more) sides of the account. It is more technical, and a quantitative in its measurement.
- Bias is a pattern of the practice of being unfair.
- Having one example of bias does not make the outlet as a whole biased -- it takes a pattern of the same behavior to label something or someone as biased.
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